Google is poised to win the AI race, not because of chips or talent, but because of access to information, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson Wednesday in Davos. “If the winner in AI is whoever has access to the most data, then I worry that Google’s going to run away with it,” he said at the Semafor Haus. “So we have to do something in order to level the playing field.”
Google garners more than three times as much data per web page as OpenAI, five times as much as Microsoft and Anthropic, and far more compared to others, he said. “If you think about it, why was OpenAI started? It was originally because Sam [Altman] and Elon [Musk] were worried that Google was going to run away with the entire game, and today we’re seeing that Google is running away with the entire game,” he said.
Prince’s solution is a more open marketplace for buying and selling data. “We’ve got willing buyers on one side who want the data, need the data,” he said. On the other side are journalists and other sites that create information but rely on advertising, “who need a new business model.”
It’s a familiar suggestion. Several publishers have inked their own deals with AI companies for their content, while others say those deals work against their best interests, trading their credibility for cash from companies that will replace them. Still, Prince is suggesting something new — that without making these deals, Google wins by default.